Fotospecial: De Young Museum

If you go to the top of the tower that rises out of San Francisco's stunning new de Young Museum, you can see for miles. You can see the Marin headlands and the downtown high-rises; on a clear day you can see the Pacific. You can look down, too, onto the main part of the museum itself and see the ingenious design of the long, low-slung structure—with wedges sliced deep into its oblong shape to let daylight penetrate—and notice how the shimmery copper that wraps the exterior even covers the roof. If museums are today's cathedrals, this tower is the de Young's campanile—though in the hands of the edgy Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, it comes with a twist. And the tower's been a lightning rod: some local critics complain that, among other things, it looms too high over the trees surrounding the museum in Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco has such a liberal vibe it's easy to forget how reluctant the city has been to embrace new architecture. There aren't many good contemporary buildings, and the major project by a trendy European architect—Mario Botta's 1995 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—has been a major disappointment. But this week's opening of the smashingly original de Young puts San Francisco on the map for any serious lover of 21st-century design. Herzog & de Meuron, who built the provocative new addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, think way outside the modernist box: with each project, they aim to break from typical forms, ideas and materials. It's an approach that asks not only why, but why not?

The big earthquake of 1989 damaged the old de Young art museum beyond repair. After voters turned down two bond issues to rebuild it, the trustees of the city-owned museum vowed to raise the money privately and hire a world-class architect. While checking out Renzo Piano's Beyeler Museum in Basel in 1998, de Young director Harry Parker and board president Dede Wilsey stumbled upon Herzog & de Meuron's stunningly unusual signal box and depot at the train station. Yes, Wilsey is the same woman unflatteringly portrayed this year in her stepson Sean Wilsey's memoir, "Oh, the Glory of It All." But in the de Young saga, she's been the fairy godmother, leading a $188 million fund-raising campaign—including her own $10 million gift—and, according to Herzog, cheerleading for the architects' unorthodox vision.

Herzog & de Meuron took their first design cues from the park. They wanted the building to appear light and, for all its beautiful strangeness, to blend—well, at least a little—into the verdant setting. After rejecting the idea of wood, they came up with a copper "skin" that would gradually age into a greenish patina. (It'll take about 15 years.) The copper panels have an irregular pattern of holes and embossed dots, determined by computer, to suggest dappled sunlight. The site imposed some constraints: the museum faces a classical garden, opposite the California Academy of Sciences (also being rebuilt, with a design—as it happens—by Renzo Piano). But the architects riffed on the garden's formal geometry: the museum's tower, at its base, lines up with the garden grid but then twists off kilter to align with the different grid of the nearby city streets. On the other end of the building, they placed a spectacular cantilevered canopy that hovers above a patio and sculpture garden.

Herzog & de Meuron aren't just showing off. Inside, they do what architects are supposed to do—make the building do its work. A series of galleries, on three levels, flow together beautifully and are geared to the museum's eclectic collection. From the soaring lobby, you can enter an array of spaces, some dark, woody and dramatically lit—for Oceanic art—others, bright and airy, for modern painting. The spaces shift from intimate to grand, and the light varies, too, especially where those wedges cut deep into the structure. There you look through glass into a lovely sliver of garden, then beyond to a coppery wall. "Everything is part of looking, or being looked at," says Herzog, who likens those fingers of outdoor space to a glove turned inside out.

The de Young isn't the first new museum to shift the art experience away from the hermetically sealed model (think of New York's Metropolitan Museum, windowless as a Vegas casino). But the notion of connecting the viewer with the outside world is especially complex here. Yes, the de Young is a pavilion in a park, but it's also urban. That's why the tower is key. From its top floor, a free public viewing area—the other floors are devoted to educational programs—you can see the rest of the beautiful city, in all its natural and man-made glory. And you may be reminded that leafy Golden Gate Park, originally built on sand dunes, is man-made, too. Consider the de Young an elegantly daring twist in the evolution of San Francisco: a place where art and people, nature and the city, all come together.